Researchers Can Now Implant False Memories Into People's Brains

Japanese researchers have developed a trick to implant false visions into people’s brains, altering the way they experience the world and potentially even the way they think. Describing the new technique in the journal Current Biology, the scientists reveal how they were able to achieve this effect without actively engaging with their subjects’ thoughts, instead prompting them to unwittingly warp their own sense of perception.

Speaking to Stat, lead researcher Takeo Watanabe explained that this simple brainwashing exercise could one day lead to new treatments for cognitive disorders such as depression and autism. By provoking people to rewire their own brains, he hopes to help patients strengthen certain healthy connections and erase other less desirable ones.

As a first step on this journey, the team sought to implant simple visual distortions into subjects’ minds, convincing them to see black grated lines as red. To do this, they asked them to focus on the lines while wired up to an fMRI machine that measured their brain activity.

At no point during the experiment were participants instructed to visualize the color red. Instead, they were simply told to “try to somehow regulate [their] brain activity” in order to make a solid grey circle – which they were informed would appear shortly afterwards – appear as large as possible.

As this was going on, the fMRI machines observed the activity in the primary and secondary visual areas of participants’ brains, with this data used to manipulate the size of the grey circle that then appeared. In other words, those whose brain patterns most closely resembled the type of activity associated with seeing the color red were shown larger circles, essentially convincing them that they were doing the exercise correctly and controlling their perception of the size of the circle.